from the that-seems-backwards dept

We've seen schools that ridiculously blame and suspend their students for videotaping misdeeds by staff or faculty... but this latest story is really bizarre. A female middle school teacher in Anderson, Indiana somehow (and the details are not at all clear) put a "racy" photo of herself onto a school-issued iPad that students were using. They found the photo... and the school suspended the students. Again, the details are pretty hazy. The photo was described by one of the students as a "topless" photo, but a police report on the incident said it was "from the neck down, with partial exposure." At the link above, Kash Hill suggests this sounds more like "a classic no-face, no-shirt shot that involved a bra and possible cleavage but no actual nudity."

It's also not entirely clear how it got onto the iPad, though the suggestion is that it may have had something to do with Apple's iCloud syncing across devices. It's entirely possible that the teacher used her own account for her own iPhone and the school iPad, leading to the images from her phone syncing to the iPad. No matter what, it makes no sense that the students are suspended and may face even more punishment:

Those students have been suspended and threatened with expulsion.

The students, quite reasonably, are infuriated at this:

"It's not our fault that she had the photo on there," Troutt said. "We couldn't do anything not to look at it, if it just popped up when he pressed the button. It was her fault that she had the photo on there. Her iPhone synched to it. She had to have pressed something to make all of her photos synch on there."

When asked about it, the school district's assistant superintendent Beth Clark told the media "the students' punishment will not be changed." Hopefully the students will seek to get the suspension overturned in some way, because based on the details this seems absolutely ridiculous.

from the life-under-SOPA dept

As much as I appreciate and highlight the importance of the DMCA's safe harbors, there remain many troubling parts of the law. The notice and takedown process is particularly questionable, in that it involves shooting first and asking questions later. When we're dealing with a system that gets so many false notices, taking down first seems kind of crazy. David Canton points us to the news of a copyright lawyer and photographer, who had her entire site shut down by GoDaddy (of course), after it received a single, totally bogus, DMCA claim. Apparently someone claimed copyright on a photograph that the blogger, Carolyn Wright, had taken herself. The DMCA claim was just wrong. And while GoDaddy is required to remove the specific infringing content if it wishes to retain safe harbor protections, it appears to have gone way beyond that in shutting the entire site down. Thankfully the situation was resolved when Wright reached out to the person sending the letter, who apologized and withdrew the claim.

That said, get ready for this kind of story becoming a lot more common if SOPA or PROTECT IP becomes law. Totally bogus takedowns happen all the time under the DMCA but are usually (though not in this case, apparently) limited specifically to the infringing content. Under SOPA you'll see a lot more drastic action, cutting off sites from ad revenue or payment processing -- with no requirement to turn them back on, even if a counternotice is filed. This is exactly why a private "notice" provision in SOPA is so scary.